MIS Magazine - The new horizons

Tuesday, 7 June 2005

There is still plenty of ‘cool factor’ technology filtering through to the enterprise space, savvy CIOs just have to pick the studs from the duds.

Virtual shift

Commercial data centres are getting excited. Matthew Proctor, managing director of Imagineering Technologies, which operates a medium-scale data centre in Melbourne, says the shift towards virtualised data centres is inevitable. VMWare, which was acquired by storage vendor EMC last year, is facing stiff competition from one other vendor: Microsoft.

The software giant gobbled up virtual machine outfit Connectix two years ago, and the improvements to VMWare’s products have seen Microsoft get more aggressive in its sales push.“We’ve looked into [virtualisation],” Proctor says. He adds his company will choose either EMC or Microsoft. “Now that the cost of processing and storage is so low, it’s now affordable to offer it to [our] clients.”

By ‘virtualising’ data centres, enterprises will be able to run legacy apps with greater ease, run multiple platforms simultaneously and get more life out of their hardware. On the supply side, data centres like Proctor’s can swap one commodity product for another. They’ll sell computing resources instead of rack space.

So who knows? Maybe this time next year you will be videoconferencing with your employees from the beach via a wireless cellular link to your virtualised data centre. Who ever said changes in technology were slowing down?